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PCMag: What is the one piece of tech that you can't travel without?AZ: My iPhone. Lots of people don't like to be so tethered and connected but I love it. I'm on the road so often that first, it keeps me sane, and second, it has my books, movies, TV shows, and social media. I also take pictures on my phone. I FaceTime and I talk to my family. I don't understand people who say, "oh, I can't wait to put away my phone." What do they mean "put it away?" I love what my phone does for me. I think people confuse "put it away" with "turn it off." I turn my phone off when I'm at dinner with my family or when we go to the beach for the day. There are plenty of times when I turn my phone off, but I always have it with me because what I can do when I turn it on is so valuable to me.

PCMag: What apps do you use? AZ: Oh my gosh. I live in a Delta hub so I have the Fly Delta app on my phone to navigate the flights that I use most often. I have an app that I use all the time for work called RadarScope. It lets me accurately look at weather radar all around the world, which is just fantastic. I'll be sitting in the hotel room one night and trying to see if there will be a thunderstorm the next afternoon. I can actually see for myself where the weather is moving, which I love. I use something called Wikihood Plus, which tells me everything going on in the given neighborhood I'm in. Sometimes I'll be shooting something on the streets of New Orleans and I'll say, "it would be really cool if we could get me waiting in line at a bus stop." So the app shows me where the bus stops are, and where everything else is. I use TrippyI'm wildly into Trippy because it's kind of like crowdsourcing the people who know best.

I have about a dozen different picture and photo apps that I love to play with: Hipstamatic, Paper Camera, Instagram, Slow Shutter Cam, and 8mm, which is one of my favorites. I've got Color Splash to color things. I have Radio Paradise and I'm really into word puzzles, so I have Scrabble HD and I have 7 Little Words and eight million versions of Angry Birds.

Meredith Popolo joined the staff shortly after graduating from snowy Syracuse University, where she earned degrees in magazine journalism and entrepreneurship. So far, the highlight of her PCMag career has been covering the Mars Curiosity rover landing from NASA's JPL in Pasadena, California. When she's not writing about tech, tweeting about Syracuse basketball, or hunting Foursquare mayorships around New York, she's likely—wait, never mind, that's basically all she does.
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